Welcome To My Cloud

Benny Pickard

Software Engineer | Cloud Architect | IT Professional

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Hi, I’m Benny, and this is my cloud. It’s lovely, isn’t it?

My “cloud” is an HTML file hosted in an AWS S3 bucket located in the Oregon us-west-2 region. Specifically, it is replicated across at least three Availability Zones in the area, with each Zone containing at least two data centers.

The HTML file and various images are stored in a Standard class S3 bucket at $0.023 per gigabyte per month and $0.0004 for every 1,000 GET requests it receives. This works out to about 2,500,000 requests per dollar (please don’t abuse this; I’m not made of money). You can deplete my wallet faster by clearing your browser cache between refreshes, so you pull all the images again too.

My cloud is about 1.5 megabytes, 1.4 megabytes of which come from the Ultra-HD purple sky with clouds image I use as the header for this page. In the grand scheme of things, this makes it a very tiny cloud whose owner doesn’t know how to scale images properly nor cared enough to purchase their usage rights (fingers crossed I don’t get sued).

I can do all this affordably because this website is static, meaning it has no memory or logic incorporated into it. S3 is essentially just a big data bucket where this file is stored.

The most expensive part of my cloud is the domain name bennypickard.cloud, which costs me $15.94 per year from a very affordable domain registrar, Porkbun.com. However, I got it at a special deal of $2.89 during the first year. Porkbun also acts as my cloud’s DNS server, forwarding your browser's DNS requests and returning the current IP address of my bucket.

The hardest part of creating my cloud was setting up a valid SSL certificate so that you can connect using the oh-so-secure HTTPS instead of mere HTTP. I acquired the certificate through the aptly named AWS Certificate Manager and validated it with my DNS server on Porkbun. Then, I requisitioned the services of Amazon CloudFront, a global caching service, to divert your HTTPS requests into HTTP requests and reduce latency times.

Fun fact: the technique behind the unmoving cloud background you see to the left and right of this text is known as a “parallax effect,” which simulates depth in a moving image by shifting different planes, or layers, of an image at different speeds.